In Media Res (Final Battle Reprise)

[Ripheus23]

In a flickering of the words between the worlds of the ages, he held both books, hand by hand, and with the knowledge of all their pages.

[One was The Way of Kings. The other was A Theory of Justice.]

What Dalinar had done to open his gate-to-on-high, here was done in a way more sly...

Not winged spheres of glory to his side, not even a flickering in the stasis of his light.

But yet another book, deeply of old, from God's providence had been given, and said at one time:

Quote

Not by My might but by My Spirit (Zechariah)... a spirit of understanding AND might (Enoch)...

So more like the lumen naturale of a geometer much later, a quizzical man who played a meditator

In a dialogue with himself, as a thought that truly existed:

As eternal as everything, besides some Creator:

That's what "glowed" around some man.

Glowed from his abstract crown down through the gauntlets of his hands.

He found a path, a fellow spirit to tell. "Tell what?" you ask? Why, one right through Hell

And Heaven too, and any other such place

Said to dwell in its own place beyond space.

Not the one imagined from the legends of old, no. These were visions from the will, not lone immortal souls.

Not a plan, more a hunger, a fell ring of fire

Made of a demon-god, a mountainous writhing pyre,

"Apollyon" by one name, "Apophis" the Egyptians once said;

"the Typhon" Greek stories shuddered,

"the Jade Emperor's foe" the Chinese bled.

 

At its heart burned an abyss of a city.

One ever aflame, undead and unremitting.

 

But even in that darksome glistening

There were others, maybe many others, closely listening.

 

Wherefrom had come the man of the truest book?

The one about justice on Earth, which the whole world shook?

Why had he written his fair tome,

His lyrical prose like a philosopher's gloaming?

From the foundations of eternity, to the simplest act of faith:

He saw through shadows of sin to a pure heart ablaze.

What had he inspired in the years since Apollyon's last great stride?

What had he offered his readers to write?

 

So from however afar, he walked below that sun.

A labyrinth of knowing he'd never yet won.

 

Now in the ring of the other legends too,

The man in the other's future curfew

Smiled the True Name of the Truth of All Truths,

The majesty of reason, the key to one proof.

 

[And to quote from elsewhere once more:

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I was so dazzled by the splendor of that Ray / that I would surely have lost my senses / had I but for an instant looked away (Dante).

... and allowing that a fuller such quote is an exercise left to the reader...]

 

For beyond all other promises was shining forth this: the vow of the ages,

A path through darkest risk.

 

There was a pattern to any history, and he knew but a few of these.

But that would have to do for now, for anyone's surcease.

He saw a thousand shadows of wars,

The blood of a thousand lost horses

And mountains and oceans and forests of trees.

 

An altar unknown, a sacrificed grave,

A place where a dark debt had been mightily paid,

And just in time, too, or else the infinite rain

Of an infinite Storm the whole world would waylay.

 

[Concluding note: the solution to this problem was given to me in a dream (Ramanujan). Cf. ZFC set theory + "there exists an abominable cardinal".]